The Knitting years .... number 4 getting personal

The new series on the history of what we wore, Knitting Patterns.

Now if this isn't the pattern our Jillian used to knit that jumper for me in 1970 with reindeer's it is as close as you can get.

The original was in brown with with red and yellow and proved such a success that she made a second in blue.

I showed it to our sons who were very envious ........... not bad for a distance of 4 decades

Picture; knitting patterns, 1930-1970 from the collection of Jillian Goldsmith

Chicken bryani in the Plaza on Upper Brook Street on Saturdays in the 70s

For those who were born around the mid 20th century who queued to see the film Spartacus, remembered with profound sadness the death of Ottis Reading and raged at the Vietnam War it is more than likely that if you were in Manchester during the late 60s into the 80s you will have eaten at the Plaza on Upper Brook Street.

I had almost forgotten my beery nights out which always seemed to end at the Plaza until a post about breakfast on my friend’s Lois’s blog brought it all back.*

I have yet to meet anyone who ate there who does not have fond memories of the place, and has their own story. Mine are many.

 I remember the night of the Milk Snatcher’s Ball at UMIST** when we fell into the cafe with our baby doll nightdresses which we had borrowed from two flatmates securely hidden under our jeans and tee shirt or the night of the vivid conversation between a man with a broken hand and his girl friend about the relative merits of an A &E unit in down town Berlin.

I am sure there were many things on the menu but I can only ever remember eating the chicken or meat bryani, half of which cost 3/6d in 1970 and was more than enough for two.

The chicken arrived on a pile of yellow rice and raw onion with a small pot of the curry sauce and after vast quantities of cheap student union beer it went down well.

Now our friend Mike had never taken to curry and so at 3 in the morning on Upper Brook Street he would ask for a roast dinner which he got, with everything including the roast potatoes, chicken, gravy and just possibly Yorkshire puddings too. It was as my friend Lois said that "everything was possible at the Plaza."

Sometime around 1972 I stopped going. I suppose it was a mix of things really. My girlfriend of the time wasn’t over keen and by the end of that year we were living off Grey Mare Lane and soon after that out in Ashton, which meant that Upper Brook Street was a serious trek.

I suspect we were also playing at being grown up and grownups eat sensibly at places like the Bella Napoli off Albert Square and on Sundays in China Town. Looking back it was my loss.

And then it had gone. When exactly I don’t know, although I have friends who still went there in the early 80s for Sunday dinner.

Now I know that with age comes a rosy nostalgia about the past, and no doubt my sons can talk of their own food dives and late night experiences but for my generation the Plaza was special, even if it was hard to remember much of the night the following day.

Picture by kh1234567890 posted on flicker photostream

*http://loiselsden.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/breakfast/

**My friend Marc always referred to it as the Tech but he went there while I and my friends Jack, Greevz, Mike, Lois and John slummed it across the road at the Poly which we always called the College of Commerce which had been its pre amalgamation name. There were other things we called it of which the College of Knowledge was one, but mercifully never Colcom which really put you out with the nerds in the dustbins.

One more lost scene of Chorlton ......... from the winter of 1963-4

 In memory of Ida Bradshaw who died on New Year's Eve and whose funeral service too place on Wednesday in St Clements, here is the first of three stories she inspired.

Ida, 1941-2026

It was taken in the winter of 1963-4 from the back upstairs window of Ida Bradshaw’s house on Neale Road.

Today the view would be obscured by the flats of Lawngreen, but back then it was all that was left of the farm yard, workshops and land of the farm which had fronted the parish graveyard for two hundred years.

To the right in the background is the Bowling Green Hotel, to the left the houses which face Brookburn Road. 

And away in the distance are the meadows.

 What is perhaps remarkable are the buildings on the horizon just left of centre.

 These I think were the homes of the sewage workers and stood just to the left of the little footbridge across Chorlton Brook.

It is still possible to make out a break in the hedge where the garage of the properties was situated. There are those in Chorlton who remember living in one of them.
Nerdy perhaps, but still real living history. If anyone has any pictures of Chorlton I would love to see them.

Picture; from the back upstairs window on Neale Road from the collection of Ida Bradshaw

A family mystery from the Great War

Now this metal notebook holder has been in the family for as long as I can remember.

It is small but quite heavy and  I am ashamed to say has suffered from being in the cellar.

Its metal exterior has been attacked by rust and I am looking at how best to restore it.

It carries the German Imperial Cross with the letter W and the date 1914, and given that my grandmother was German I assumed it belonged to one of her family.

But now I am not so sure.
The name inscribed on the front is not one I recognise.

Of course that doesn’t prove it is not one of our family but allows for some doubt.

Alternatively it could have been picked up on the Western Front by either my grandfather or great uncle Jack.

Both served in the British Army and both were in France.

Whatever its origins I do know that it passed to my uncle who served in the RAF and whose name, serial number and the words RAF were inscribed inside.

Uncle Roger enlisted in 1938 aged 16 and saw action in Greece, and Iraq before being captured by the Japanese in 1942 and died in a prisoner of war camp the following year aged just 21.

And that offers up a second mystery because it remained in our possession.  I very much doubt that had it headed out to the Far East with him it would have returned.

I am of course totally prepared to accept the commonsense explanation that he just left it behind for anyone of a number of reasons.

The German side of our family is the one that we have not explored and when we do we might find the answer to its original owner.

Sadly there is no one left to ask and had we not decided to clear out the middle cellar I suspect it would have been many more years before I came across it.

All of which is a lesson in how to look after family objects.  All too often because we have grown up with them we take the item for granted, and that can lead to neglect and eventually to the loss of the object.

So that is it.  The search has begun.  Leaving me only to reflect on the irony of the fact that it passed to my uncle who was in the RAF but like my mother had been born in Cologne.

Picture; metal notebook holder, circa 1914, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Snaps of Chorlton No 1 a lost road and a demolished house from Ida

In memory of Ida Bradshaw who died on New Year's Eve and whose funeral service too place yesterday in St Clements, here is the secondof three stories she inspired

Ida, 1941-2026

Most of the images we see of Chorlton in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were the work of professional photographers. 

They arrived in the township, focused on the popular bits and sold them on to the postcard companies.  Sometimes on the off chance they prowled the new roads of New Chorlton and the Ville, taking pictures of individual houses and offering them at a knock down rate to the residents.

Then there were the serious amateurs like Aaron Booth* who in the early 1880s was taking photographs of Martledge. But there are also the snappers, who captured whatever took their fancy.  Often the images are a little blurred and in many cases have a significance lost in time.

And so with this in mind here is the new series.  Snaps of Chorlton, is an occasional rummage through pictures most of which were never meant to be shared beyond the family. Of course the advent of the camera phone has given this a new lease of life.

But for now I am concentrating on old fashioned images and I am starting with two from Ida.  The first was taken by her dad and while the date is unknown it must be before the development of the precinct, because this is Manchester Road from the corner of Wilbraham Road.  Back then it is still a tree lined road of big houses which gently curved round past the Savoy Picture House and around the library.  The car park has yet to break the sweep of the road.

It is a scene I featured recently from a 1938 postcard but is well worth another look.

The second is more recent.  We are on Beech Road, after the demolition of Row House and the factory which stood beside it.  And Ida’s picture perfectly reflects that other thing about snaps which is that they seldom are of popular or photogenic views which makes them equally important.

Row House dated from the early 19^th century and had quite a history.  Here lived the Blomely’s who gave their name to the fish pond that ran from Acres Road up to Chequers Road, and also lived William Batty, politician, jeweller and Methodist  For a while the house was used as our “Penny Reading Room”, while the adjoining building had been a laundry and factory.

So its passing which generated a stir at the time is important as it was one of the last examples of an early 19^th century property in the township.  And here I have a confession, for I have a brick from the house.  I asked for it and the demolition gang a little bemused handed it over.  It was handmade, perhaps with clay from our own clay pits off Oswald Road and I guess was put in place around about 1800.

And a little later Ida took her picture.

Location; Chorlton, Manchester

Pictures; from the collection of Ida Bradshaw

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/aaron-booth-and-his-pictures-of.html

It started with a picture and became a story.......... Charles Ireland

The Palais de Luxe, circa 1928

It started with a picture and became a story.

The picture was of the Palais de Luxe Cinema on Barlow Moor Road and is not one I had seen before.

In that usual way of things it was in the possession of the archives and public records centre of East Dunbartonshire Council and got there because the fine iron and glass canopy which fronted the cinema had been made by the Lion Foundry in Kirkintilloch.

The story unfolded as the archivist and I sought to resolve the copyright issue of the photograph.

Ms Janice Miller was keen for me to see the picture but quite rightly was concerned that this might contravene the 70 year rule on copyright usage.

The photograph was by C Ireland and may have been taken around 1928 and that was all there was to go on. He might have been a local photographer or one especially commissioned by the Lion Foundry who came down from Scotland or just possibly one of those travelling photographers who captured local scenes to be converted into post cards.

Now both of us were fully prepared for a disappointment. After all we had just a name which is not much to go on.

But a Charles Ireland ran a photographic shop at 25 Lower Mosley Street in town during the first decade of the last century and continued in business there to at least 1927. The same set of telephone directories also revealed that by 1921 he was living at 76 High Lane here in Chorlton.

It is one of those amazing things about detective work that once the first secrets of a person’s life come to light others bubble up in front of you.

He had died in 1930 aged 63, left £5,330 to his widow and was buried in Southern Cemetery. He had been born in Newton in Manchester in 1867 and by 1891 the family were living here on St Clements Road.

This seems to have been a step up. The family home on Oldham Road in Newton was at the heart of an industrial area. Just to the north was the large carriage and wagon works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and to the south and east there were brick works cotton mills, bleach works as well a glass works.

25 Lower Mosley Street, 1964

Charles’s father Edward was in partnership as a pawnbroker although he also described himself as a photographer, and by 1891 this appears to have been his sole occupation.

There were as yet few photographers listed in the directories for Manchester in the 1880s and they are still described as artists.

By 1895 he had opened the shop on Lower Mosley Street which Charles still ran until the late 1920s.

The family continued to prosper and by 1911 they have moved to that large detached house on the corner of Edge Lane and Kingshill Road.

76 High Lane, date unknown

As ever the romantic in me fastened on the fact that in 1913 Charles married his photographic assistant. Edith May Hindley was 32 years old and like him had been born in Newton.

Sometime perhaps around 1918 they moved into 76 High Lane which had been the home of the artist Tom Mostyn the artist.

 It is still there having benefited from the addition of the large upstairs window and studio which I guess was the work of Tom Mostyn and which Charles in turn may have used.

I have yet to visit the grave in Southern Cemetery but it is on my list of things to do. Here he was buried along with his father and mother in law, his sister and finally in 1948 his wife

So far no other pictures accredited to Charles have turned up but they will. His working life stretched back over 40 years and the picture of 76 High Lane may even be his although sadly there is no date and the quality is pretty poor.

But I travel in hope that out there in a collection I will come across more of his pictures. Ms Janice Miller and the East Dunbartonshire archive can only be the first.

Location; Chorlton and Manchester

Pictures; the Palais de Luxe cinema, circa 1928 GD10-07-04-6-13-01 Courtesy of East Dunbartonshire Archives, 25 Lower Mosley Street by H W Beaumont 1964 m02915, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, & 76 High Lane, date unknown, from the Lloyd collection

Henry IV Part 1 .... the discussion on the wireless about a favourite play

 I enjoyed this edition of  In Our Time, which discussed Shakespeare's Henry 1V Part 1.

Falstaff

"Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. 

This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. 

When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

With; Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford, Lucy Munro, Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Kings College London, and Laurence Publicover, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol

Producer; Simon Tillotson"

Picture; Falstaff, 1906, Eduard von Grützner 1846–1925

*Henry IV Part 1, BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002qth3